“Frankly, that’s all we need to support to justify a new release,” said Jeremy White, bloodless President and CEO of CodeWeavers. “We had the zombies practically beating down our doors to be able to run the sequel. We’re particularly pleased that we were able to support Left4Dead 2 as soon as it was released. In this way, Linux and Mac users can also do their bit to stave off the effects of the apocalyptic zombie plague sweeping this nation.”

The “Sky Mode” GUI setting and “gl_drawskys” config variable have been removed. Now “SkyBox” is used if mouse look is enabled, “Standard Sky” otherwise. There is no more sky stretching with “SkyBox” mode.

Fixed stat screen animation for The Ultimate Doom and the Doom II cast BOSSBACK after MAP30 when using ‘not adjusted’ rendering.

Fixed detail walls when “GL_ARB_multitexture” extension is not supported or gl_compatibility is used.

Fixed bug where music doesn’t change after IDMUS is used and a New Game is started.

Fixed bug where using the “End Level” key while a demo is paused breaks the “End Level” feature.

Guild Software, the developers of Vendetta Online, has released a HD trailer to celebrate the Linux-native massive multiplayer space combat game’s five years of operation. Moreover, they are running a free trial promotion with MMORPG.com:

MMORPG.com and Guild Software are pleased to present this very special trial offer for Vendetta Online – the sci-fi space MMORPG! These trial keys will give you 21 days of unlimited access to the game world! Get your key while supplies last!

These keys give 21 days of free play, along with access to a special edition, limited-access ship (Vulture Anniversary Edition). The ship is made available to any characters created on the account where the key is applied, from now on. Be advised, the lower-level anniversary ship is only available in Capitol stations, so the player must progress out of the initial “training” sector before they will find it. There is also a high-level version of the ship in Corvus space.

Piper announced to us that tgatb (The Goblin and the Butterfly) is a free to play MMORPG under development in the alpha stage:

If you want to help to develop the game, try to contact piper (thats me) in game (there is a mail feature in game to send mails to offline players. You can find out more about that by reading the help files, type #help).

Piper is also looking for artists and an additional game client programmer (C, SDL).

Portalized has been reborn as the new project Pseudoform (thanks Nemoder!). It is a community-driven collaboration project that aims to create an involving and brain-melting first-person puzzle-solving game.

Pseudoform is also now an open source project; the editor and source code are available for download.

I feel silly, because I remember seeing Machinarium before this week and thinking it looked neat, but somehow assumed it didn’t have a Linux port. Well, I was clearly mistaken, as this IGF award winner for Excellence in Visual Art is available natively. Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game (I can’t even remember the last one I played, but it, as it was for probably many of you, was my first PC game genre) starring an adorable robot on a quest.

You can play the (Flash-based) demo in your web browser; if you decide to purchase it, it’s available for $20 US (plus soundtrack).

I have three invites to the Heroes of Newerth beta available still; first-come first-serve to the initial three commenters below. I haven’t played myself in a while, mainly due to a cross-country move, but also partially because I still haven’t gotten the hang of the game (I never played DoTA). To those in it, how are you liking the beta?

One of the most requested features in QUAKE LIVE and something that I think would be at the core of any premium service, would be the ability to very easily and quickly start a private match (that only you and the players you invite can join). Right now, all of our matches are open to the public and started by our back end systems. So, what we’re looking at creating is a totally integrated and very easy to use method for starting and running a personalized private match.

Evil Geniuses posted a four-part “Quake Bible” that has some interesting Bushido-esque philosophical advice for players.

Also, there’s been some consternation over recent comments John Carmack made to Variety (as a side note, I had completely missed that Variety now covered gaming news) about Rage probably not having a dedicated server for multiplayer. While initially disconcerting, my understanding is that Rage is primarily a single-player or co-operative multiplayer game, and not deathmatch-oriented like previous titles.

EDIT: Yeah, here’s the quote I was thinking of from a recent Shacknews interview:

Todd Hollenshead: I expect that we will be online on the consoles. It is a single-player, story-driven game with co-op capabilities, as opposed to a game where co-op is the way in which it’s built then there’s a different version of the game that’s not as fun by yourself… There’s no deathmatch in it now. If you put two people in the same time, they can shoot at each other, but there’s a whole bunch of different stuff that goes into that versus a cooperative campaign.

“We wanted the audio playback to be CD quality (44KHz 16bit stereo), and we wanted to be able to play a lot of different songs, so I chose an embedded Linux system to run the audio,” he explained. The other challenge? Pinball games are designed to be played roughly, and the team already had to deal with a shaking play field.

“I prototyped with a BeagleBoard, but moved to a Gumstix Overo Earth board for the final system because it is rated up to 90 C and is reported to have passed the 5 year MIL-STD-810F 514.5 military vibration test,” said Klyce.

Here comes the science. “Since the Gumstix Linux board does not use 5 volts on board, I used an Arduino Mega board to interface to the Williams System 11 CPU board. The Arduino Mega watches the sound command signals and translates them into serial commands that are sent to the Linux board over USB.”

What Linux-based game hardware projects have you seen and/or worked on?